Monday, December 9, 2013

Kill the Landlord, Save the Man

Some
expressions are so familiar, so deeply entwined in our history that,
although they are thoroughly racist, even homicidal, they fail to elicit
much surprise or shock. Familiar with their presence, we become inured
to their depravity. And, because they fail to surprise us, they
oftentimes fail to offend us as well. While the degree to which they
influence us is subject to dispute, few will doubt that our culture is
stitched together by just such threads. Maintaining an infamous position
among these is the phrase "the only good Indian is a dead Indian."

Derived
from statements delivered by the Civil War hero Philip Sheridan, the
notion that "the only good Indian is a dead Indian" contributed to not
only the justification of the conquest of the continent; it also abetted
that which is indistinct from the conquest, the dehumanization and
genocide of Native Americans. What deserves to be considered alongside
this fact is that, intimately related to Sheridan's phrase is the
somewhat more subtle, though no less genocidal, civilizational motto of
the founder of the Carlise Indian Industrial School: "kill the Indian,
save the man." To be sure, as Ward Churchill, among others, apprises us,
the Carlisle School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, was designed to
assimilate (by force, and with the express intent of eradicating the
cultures of) the indigenous people of North America.

The
association and affinity of these two phrases is not subject to
contention. The founder of the Carlisle School, Richard Henry Pratt,
himself admitted as much. In 1892, in his Official Report of
the Annual Conference of Charities and Correction, after referencing
the statement attributed to Sheridan that "the only good Indian is a
dead Indian," Pratt added: "I agree with the sentiment." However, he
went on to explain, this agenda can be pursued in a far more effective
and profitable manner than Sheridan's. One can "kill the Indian," Pratt
continued, and still "save the man."

In light of
this, it may come as a surprise to note that, in his time, Pratt was
regarded as something of a progressive. Among certain crowds, his
position would even be regarded as progressive today (which, obviously,
doesn't speak well of today's general social atmosphere). For, in spite
of his racism, mingled in with his white supremacism, lurked the
fundamentally universalist (even egalitarian) recognition that, when
born, each person is, as he put it, "a blank, like the rest of us." That
is, contrary to prevalent conceptualizations, Pratt did not maintain
that people from different cultures, ethnic backgrounds, and "races"
possessed some distinct essence. Rather, Pratt recognized that, though
not exclusively, people are largely products of their environments and
cultures. As he put it, "Transfer the infant white to the savage
surroundings, he will grow to possess a savage language, superstition,
and habit. Transfer the savage-born infant to the surroundings of
civilization, and he will grow to possess a civilized language and
habit. These results have been established over and over again beyond
all question."

Needless
to say, Pratt's "open-mindedness" is very much restricted. Not only
were Pratt's characterizations of indigenous people (as savages), and of
mainstream US culture (as civilization, and superior) unambiguously
racist. The violent manner by which students were forcibly removed from
their families (a process hardly distinct from kidnapping) evinced a
deep lack of respect for his students' humanity. This should not come as
much of a surprise since, according to Pratt, the humanity of
indigenous people was not so much present as merely potential - a
potential to be developed by force. For let's not forget, Pratt's
intention was to destroy his students' languages and cultures. His
students, and all Native Americans in his opinion, were to be
transformed - or deformed, rather - into the "blanks" referred to above.
Once blanked out (as cells in the cloning process are flushed of their
genetic material), new information - imperialistic US culture - was to
be inserted, replacing his students with a type of cultural clone. It is
from this perspective that we should read Article 2, section (e), of
the Genocide Convention. According to this, the crime of genocide is
defined as "forcibly transferring children of
the group to another group," "with intent to destroy in whole or in
part a national, ethnic, or religious group." And, as the legal scholar
Kurt Mundorff argues in the Harvard International Law Journal, it is only by ahistorical circumlocution and dissimulation that the actions of Pratt, and others, can not be recognized as genocide.

Along
with outright conquest and murder, the forced removal of indigenous
people to reservations, and the removal of children to boarding schools
like Carlisle (schools designed to delete a culture, to "kill the
Indian, save the man") were part of a sustained effort that, among other
harms, reduced formerly economically independent peoples to conditions
of utter dependence. As such, there is a heinous irony in the fact that,
as Pratt put it, the Carlisle School (and all of the boarding schools
participating in these policies) strove to teach its students how to
live "by the sweat of his brow." For Native American people already knew
very well how to live "by the sweat" of their brow. Before their
territory was appropriated (by way of deceptive treaties and fraud as
much as by outright force), and before the resources they, for the most
part, lived in respectful interdependence with were - like the bison -
negligently, recklessly, and intentionally destroyed, First Nations
people lived "by the sweat" of their brows very well. Pratt must have
known this.

As
a career soldier who served as an officer for eight years on the Great
Plains, and fought in several campaigns in the so-called Indian Wars,
Pratt may be said to have contributed directly as well as indirectly to
the destruction of Native Americans' independence. As such, it seems
tremendously unlikely that he was unaware that indigenous societies very
much knew how to live, and did live, by "the sweat" of their brows.
Beyond this, it takes an astounding degree of hypocrisy for Pratt to
state that US culture (which is inextricable from the exploitation of
slave and "free" labor alike - the sweat of others' brows) could
meaningfully instruct a formerly independent people to live by "the
sweat" of their own brow. This hypocrisy is only amplified by the fact
that the abject poverty and dependence indigenous people were reduced to
by the late 19th century was the direct result of the bloody
colonization of the US. Insofar as hypo-critical literally means
sub-critical, however, it is very likely that Pratt was not even aware
of this twisted irony.

Irrespective
of whether or not Pratt was able to recognize this irony, or whether he
was aware of the degree of harm he caused, it ought to be remarked
that, as the English philosopher Francis Bacon observed in his essay Of Usury,
it is the command "in sudore vultus tui comedes panem tuum; not, in
sudore vultus alieni ["in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread—not
in the sweat of another’s face]" that is "the first law."

That is,
from the biblical exhortation delivered to Adam that "in the sweat of
thy face shall thou eat bread" (that one must derive one's bread from
one's own labor), Bacon infers a deeper truth: that, beyond this, one
should not eat, or profit, from the toil of another. And while living
off the sweat or toil of others is a clear violation of this "first
law," this is precisely the law that both undergirds the US economy
historically, and continues to subtend profit-making in general.

No
person (or social role, rather) exemplifies this eating in the "sweat
of another's face" as unambiguously as the institution, or arrangement,
of the Landlord - the rentier, in general, who simply sits back and
lives off of the rents, "the sweat" of others' labor. Some, no doubt,
will contend that because the Landlord provides a much needed service
(housing, among other things), the Landlord is rightfully entitled to
collect this sweat. It takes little scrutiny, though, to see that this
claim is hardly more than an unsupported assertion. For what is the
service that the Landlord provides? When it comes to housing, the
Landlord merely pays other people, plumbers, for instance, to provide
services - a payment, by the way, that is always less than the amount of
rent the Landlord obtains. Were this not the case, the Landlord would
suffer a loss, and would have no incentive to maintain the relation at
all. In other words, if the "duties" of the Landlord outweighed the
Landlord's "rights," if the Landlord derived no profit, it would be in
his or her interest to simply surrender the property, or to evict
everyone. The landlord, however, very rarely does this. And this is so
because, supported by the police, the courts, and other apparatuses of
the state, the landlord is always deriving a profit from this business
relationship. That is, the Landlord is always eating from the "sweat" of
his or her tenants - in violation of what Bacon referred to as "the
first law."

Another
argument that people may raise in favor of the Landlord is that, because
the Landlord owns the land, the Landlord has a right to collect rent,
or sweat, from his or her tenants. Aside from the circularity of this
reasoning, however, one should ask how this landlord came into
possession of this property in the first place. One person, no doubt,
purchased land from another. But how did a piece of land become a piece
of property? No one built land. As George Orwell reminds us,
the original owners "simply seized it [the land] by force, afterwards
hiring lawyers to supply them with title-deeds." And it hardly takes an
expert in the intricacies of US History to see that, in the context of
the United States (though not only in the United States), all of the
land now owned as property was taken by just such force from the
continent's indigenous people. As such, property owners do not provide a
service so much as profit from a harm. Or, rather, they profit from two
harms: the harm of the seizure of the land, and the harm of the ongoing
consumption of their tenants' "sweat." Those who regard the
nullification of title to excessive real property as a harm simply
confuse a harm for a harm's correction.

This
argument, however, should not be construed to mean that people should
not have the right to be secure in their homes. As George Orwell phrased
it in his As I See It column of August 18, 1944,
"It is desirable that people should own their own dwelling houses, and
it is probably desirable that a farmer should own as much land as he
[sic] can actually farm. But the ground-landlord in a town area has no
function and no excuse for existence. He is merely a person who has
found out a way of milking the public while giving nothing in return. He
causes rents to be higher, he makes town planning more difficult, and
he excludes children from green spaces: that is literally all that he
does, except to draw his in-come."

As more and more people spend ever larger portions of their incomes on rent, and as more and more homes are being foreclosed upon and acquired by hedge funds and banks (which now comprise society's largest class of landlords),
and as society continues to polarize into the extremes of rich and
poor, it may be time to consider adopting Bacon's "first law." Insofar
as this relates to property ownership, by nationalizing, for instance,
and then internationalizing real property, land and the resources
derived therefrom can be shared among the people of the world - as
opposed to being hoarded by the few, as they are today.

Among
its other benefits, the elimination of Landlordism (which is nothing
short of the legalization of Warlordism) would alleviate up to half, and
often more, of people's financial burdens; in so doing, this would free
people from unnecessary work - an unburdening that would allow for not
only a resurgence of community, but a democratization of society.
Additionally, the elimination of excessive work would result in the
lessening of the pollution that such work produces - leading to a far
healthier environment. That is, in addition to ameliorating social
harms, the elimination of Landlordism could also contribute to the
correction of climate change.

In
light of people's tendency to resort to violence, it must be stressed
that the Landlord, as a human being, is not exclusively responsible for
the harms reproduced by contemporary socio-economic relations. Though
the Landlord profits from exploitation, insofar as this particular
political-economic system reproduces myriad social, ecological, and
other harms, it is this system that needs to be changed - and such a
change is negated to the extent that it involves harm to any person,
including the Landlord. Rather than harming the Landlord, the
elimination of Landlordism entails simply the vaporization of the
excessive advantages the Landlord enjoys, and the concomitant
restitution of the land s/he hoards to the community. In other words, a
necessary though not necessarily sufficient pre-condition for advancing
toward an actually just, actually democratic, actually egalitarian
political-economic system requires, among other steps, that we strip the
Landlord of the right to gross excess - that we Kill the Landlord, and
Save the Man.